PC vendor Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) yesterday said it is making better advances in expanding its server revenue over a five-year span to 2026, extending last quarter’s growth momentum.
Asustek fell behind its local peers in tapping into the server market, but its ambition to grow server revenue by five times within the 2022 to 2026 period looks more realistic after its strong performance in this year’s first quarter.
Server revenue increased several times last quarter from a year earlier to about NT$100 billion (US$3.1 billion), Asustek said.
Photo: Vanessa Cho, Taipei Times
“We are a latecomer to the server market, but we are making all-out efforts to achieve a better performance than we have announced,” Asustek chairman Jonney Shih (施崇棠) told reporters after the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting yesterday.
“There will be multiple times [of growth]. Besides, the timing is just ripe,” Shih said.
Asustek said it is confident that its server business would grow at a similar pace throughout this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers.
The company counts some of the world’s major cloud server providers as its server clients.
Asustek said about 70 percent to 80 percent of its server revenue came from AI servers.
To play catch-up, Asustek has created a server team, which comprises more than 600 engineers.
The company said it aims to expand the team without giving any specific numbers.
Asustek said its server team is can compete with the nation’s major original design manufacturing (ODM) companies in developing high-quality products.
The company said it can equip servers with Nvidia Corp’s latest Blackwell GPU architecture.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), which makes AI servers powered by Nvidia’s AI chips, has the biggest server team among local ODM companies, with 2,200. Quanta aims to grow its server team by 10 percent this year to catch up with strong demand.
Asustek is also focusing on developing its AI robot ZenBo.
The company invested in AI robots a few years ago, but its development was “premature,” given inadequate computing power at the time, Shih said.
“There was no fundamental demand at the time, as it was not intelligent enough to interact with users,” Shih said. “Now, Asustek’s Zenbo can speak to users fluently and respond to their needs after being trained on big-language models”
“The timing is right,” he added.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, surpassing the US$600 billion mark for the first time, the central bank said yesterday. Last month, the country’s foreign exchange reserves rose US$5.51 billion from a month earlier to reach US$602.94 billion due to an increase in returns from the central bank’s portfolio management, the movement of other foreign currencies in the portfolio against the US dollar and the bank’s efforts to smooth the volatility of the New Taiwan dollar. Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民)said a rate cut cycle launched by the US Federal Reserve
Handset camera lens maker Largan Precision Co (大立光) on Sunday reported a 6.71 percent year-on-year decline in revenue for the third quarter, despite revenue last month hitting the highest level in 11 months. Third-quarter revenue was NT$17.68 billion (US$581.2 million), compared with NT$18.95 billion a year earlier, the company said in a statement. The figure was in line with Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co’s (元大投顧) forecast of NT$17.9 billion, but missed the market consensus estimate of NT$18.97 billion. The third-quarter revenue was a 51.44 percent increase from NT$11.67 billion in the second quarter, as the quarter is usually the peak
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
Pegatron Corp (和碩), a key assembler of Apple Inc’s iPhones, on Thursday reported a 12.3 percent year-on-year decline in revenue for last quarter to NT$257.86 billion (US$8.44 billion), but it expects revenue to improve in the second half on traditional holiday demand. The fourth quarter is usually the peak season for its communications products, a company official said on condition of anonymity. As Apple released its new iPhone 17 series early last month, sales in the communications segment rose sequentially last month, the official said. Shipments to Apple have been stable and in line with earlier expectations, they said. Pegatron shipped 2.4 million notebook